Maggie Haberman Has No Mouth And She Must Scream

She has no choice; she is a gelatinous mass, a bubble of viscous cytoplasm with an anus, lacking sense organs, appendages, cilia. Animated by some dark curse that also grants her cognition, so that as she lurches – obscene, rancid, staining her path with a sickly-sweet residue – she pontificates. As she envelops a child’s wooden train: “The Simpsons only got good after season 17.” Gumming up a water treatment facility: “Crackle is the best streaming site.” Suffocating a village as completely as Pompeii: “POTUS gave his best speech as POTUS.”

We cannot judge her for the nonsense she thinks up. We are not in her place, a ball of conscious snot ambulating around Washington. The pressure on a mind merely existing in that state, let alone trying to reconcile careerist cognitive dissonance on a world-altering scale, is incomprehensible.

But turn now, if you can stomach it, to contemplating something uglier than her body: her social position. The isolation! The loneliness! Wobbling jelly has no experience of communal life. Even as Maggie Haberman reports (and tweets and tweets and tweets and tweets) on a tumbril remark by Steve Mnuchin’s vulgar trophy wife, the social relations are simply invisible to her. She can’t see that the obscenity isn’t the speech, it’s the position of the speakers; that a c-suite Goldman Sachs wife deboarding Air Force One laden with designer clothes is an indictment of the system that allowed it to happen.